Re: gender bias in language

["Kahn, Stacey" <skahn -at- WB -dot- COM>]

Gene Ledbetter (gledbet -at- HEARTLAND -dot- BRADLEY -dot- EDU> writes:

> James Perkins mentioned the idiosyncratic convention of
> using the pronoun "she," rather than the traditional "he,"
> when referring to an anonymous individual. I once owned an
> entire book that followed this unconvention. The practice
> was distracting and irritating, and it detracted from an
> otherwise interesting book on how to get published.
[snip]
> The last thing technical writers should do is subject their
> readers [writers/their] to unnecessary confusion or complexity.

OTOH, I cannot read a generic "he" and believe that it refers to me. I've been
called many things but "he" has never been one of them. Understanding myself as
a "he" is a foreign to me as "she" apparently is to you.

How is it any less confusing to your readers for the non-hes to have to make
the mental translation?


Stacey Kahn
SKahn -at- wb -dot- com
speaking for myself and not for my employers


The last thing technical writers should do is subject their
readers [writers/their] to unnecessary confusion or
complexity. If we must have a fetish, let it be precision,
e.g., "the hermaphroditic patient should visit his and her
physician regularly."

Gene Ledbetter

> One of my university professors always used "she" instead
> of "he" in all of HIS writing.  He explained at the
> beginning of his books and documents that this was his
> convention.  It seemed quite inoffensive: women were happy
> to see the change to "she", especially from a man, and the
> biased men thought it was just a personal idiosyncracy of
> the writer.  I adopted this convention when writing for
> students at a university in Australia and also found it
> well-appreciated.